Prologue

Since the Anglo-Saxon settlement in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the many hundreds of years of its existence, many attacks had been made upon England. Those assaults had come from without, in the form of many wars, and from within, like the Black Plague. No matter how large or severe the threat, however, people still said that the sun would never set upon the British Empire.

But the people who said that had never seen anything like this.